The Full Text of “The Tollund Man”
The Full Text of “The Tollund Man”
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“The Tollund Man” Introduction
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"The Tollund Man" is Irish poet Seamus Heaney's reflection on human nature, religion, and the history of violence. Imagining a visit to the Tollund Man—an Iron Age human sacrifice preserved in a peat bog—the poem's speaker observes that, more than 2,400 years later, people are still dying terrible deaths in the name of their fervent beliefs. In particular, the Tollund Man's fate makes the speaker think of the Troubles, a long and bloody 20th-century conflict between Irish Catholics and Protestants. The poem first appeared in Heaney's 1972 collection Wintering Out.
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“The Tollund Man” Summary
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One day the speaker would like to go to Denmark to visit the Tollund Man, a mummified Iron Age man who was sacrificed to ancient gods. The speaker imagines admiring the Tollund Man's head (stained as brown as the peat bog that preserved it), his gentle, seed-shaped eyelids, and his pointy leather cap.
Near the spot where the Tollund Man was found (with his last meal of porridge still preserved in his belly and no clothes on except for his hat, a belt, and the noose he was strangled with), the speaker imagines standing and thinking for a long time. The Tollund Man, the speaker imagines, was a human sacrifice to a pagan goddess.
That goddess tightened the "necklace" of the noose around the Tollund Man's neck and welcomed him into the dark bog. The bog's waters preserved the Tollund Man as if he were an incorruptible Catholic saint.
He was preserved until people cutting peat discovered him, like a treasure, in their maze-like diggings. Now, he rests safely in a museum in the town of Aarhus.
Thinking of the Tollund Man, the speaker feels on the verge of doing something sacrilegious: blessing the bog as if it were a church, and praying to the Tollund Man as if he were a saint.
The speaker would ask the Tollund Man to resurrect all the people who have died in the Irish Troubles, bringing murdered farmworkers back to life.
The speaker would ask the Tollund Man to reconstruct all the shredded bodies of four brothers who were dragged to death behind a train.
The speaker imagines driving down Danish roads feeling about the same way that the Tollund Man did on his way to his execution: sad and strangely free.
The speaker would say the names of Danish towns aloud and get confused directions from the locals, whose language the speaker doesn't understand.
Out in the Jutland area, where people used to make blood sacrifices, the speaker imagines feeling lost and sad—but also as if in familiar territory.
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“The Tollund Man” Themes
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Violence, Religion, and History
Imagining a visit to the mummified corpse of the “Tollund Man”—a famous Iron Age body that was found almost perfectly preserved in a peat bog—the poem’s speaker reflects on humanity’s legacy of violence. Knowing that the Tollund Man was likely killed as a religious sacrifice, the speaker is reminded of all the people who have died in the Troubles, a long-running and bloody war between Ireland’s Protestant and Catholic factions. Religious violence, the poem suggests, is nothing new: it’s an enduring (and bewildering) human tragedy.
The preserved Tollund Man, the speaker notes, is a record of an ancient religious killing: he was sacrificed to “the goddess” thousands of years ago. But his well-preserved face, with its “mild,” gentle expression, is also a reminder that he was once a real, live human being, not just a mythic figure from a dark past.
In fact, the Tollund Man’s predicament feels eerily familiar and contemporary, reminding the speaker of the Troubles. Remembering not-so-distant incidents in which Irish people of different religious backgrounds slaughtered each other in their own homes or dragged each other to their deaths “for miles along the lines” of railways, the speaker observes that violence is in no way a relic of history. The speaker even imagines himself in the Tollund Man’s place: just one more person in a world in which people kill each other in God’s (or the gods’) name.
Visiting the Tollund Man, the speaker imagines, would thus leave him feeling “unhappy and at home”: the old corpse’s testimony that religious belief can drive ordinary people to violence will feel all too familiar to him. But, he imagines, he’ll feel “lost,” too, sadly bewildered about why this should be so. And the fact that the speaker would have to visit Denmark to see the Tollund Man underlines both these points: this foreign country, where he doesn’t even understand the language, has the same legacy of religious violence as anywhere else in the world.
When the speaker gets the “blasphem[ous]” urge to treat the gentle-faced Tollund Man like a miraculously preserved Catholic saint, praying to him to resurrect all the Irish dead of the Troubles, he thus appeals to a kind of common humanity that he hopes also might endure across generations, in spite of senseless killing.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
- Lines 21-32
- Lines 33-44
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The Tragedy of Futile Sacrifice
The speaker of this poem imagines visiting the “Tollund Man,” whose ancient, mummified body bears the marks of human sacrifice: he was killed, scholars speculate, in an Iron Age religious ritual that was meant to make the land fertile. Thinking of this body, the speaker reflects on all the lives that have been lost to similar sacrifices over human history, right up to the 20th century. In particular, he thinks of the Troubles, a religious and political war between Catholics and Protestants that killed thousands of Irish people. To the speaker, such sacrifices are particularly heartbreaking because they don’t, in his view, actually achieve any of the goals they hope to.
The speaker puts himself in the Tollund Man’s shoes, imagining that he was a more or less willing self-sacrifice. With his “mild” eyes and his gentle expression, the Tollund Man seems resigned to being the “bridegroom to the goddess.” He might have been “sad” as he was carried off to his execution—but the speaker imagines he would also have felt a kind of “freedom” in serving his gods and his people. Perhaps he even felt that being a human sacrifice made him special or holy. And the speaker’s vision of his preserved corpse as a “saint’s kept body” suggests that such beliefs in the value of sacrifice persist: modern-day Catholics still preserve and venerate the mummified bodies of saints and martyrs.
But the speaker’s grim memories of the “scattered,” shredded bodies of Irish people killed in the Troubles suggest that he doesn’t put much stock in the idea of holy sacrifices. When he thinks of the Irish dead—who died defending their vision of either an independent Ireland or a united Britain—he only sees horrors: “four young brothers” dragged to death on train tracks and the battered “flesh of laborers” rotting on their own farms. These deaths, in the speaker’s view, aren’t just appalling: they’re utterly pointless, sacrifices that bring about none of the change they aim for.
As the speaker imagines traveling the “old man-killing parishes” of Denmark, then, he feels both “unhappy and at home,” knowing that, in one way or another, people have been making human sacrifices for centuries. And such sacrifices, so laden with meaning for the people who lay down their lives, ring hollow in the long view: the crops don’t grow any better, and Ireland doesn’t change.
Where this theme appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20
- Lines 21-32
- Lines 33-44
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Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis of “The Tollund Man”
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Lines 1-4
Some day I ...
... pointed skin cap."The Tollund Man" begins in the speaker's imagination. "Some day," the speaker thinks, he'd like to visit "Aarhus," the city in Denmark where the Tollund Man himself was discovered in 1950.
This is an allusion to a famous bog body (that is, one of several Iron Age mummies discovered in peat bogs). The Tollund Man is one of the best-preserved of all of these bodies; though he's 2,400 years old, visitors to the museum where he rests can still see the stubble on his chin—and the noose around his neck. Many researchers believe that he was strangled as part of a religious ritual, a human sacrifice to appease nature gods.
But at the outset of the poem, the speaker isn't focused so much on the Tollund Man's grim fate. Instead, he's looking at his calm, gentle face. The mummy's skin is stained "peat-brown," and his closed eyelids make the speaker think of "mild pods," a metaphor that suggests the Tollund Man looks a lot like the old, rich, partly-decayed vegetation of the peat bog he was found in. It's as if he himself has become a kind of earth god.
But if he looks strange and earthy, he also looks very human. He's wearing a "pointed skin cap"—an everyday detail that reminds readers both of his humanity and his great age. (One doesn't see too many pointed skin caps on the street these days.) And those seed-pod eyes are "mild" and gentle, as if he were peacefully sleeping.
The speaker's careful imagery in this first stanza suggests that he's already spent quite a bit of time looking at the Tollund Man. Remember, he's only imagining a visit to Aarhus here; all his previous acquaintance with the Tollund Man must have been through photographs. He seems to have developed a fascination with this astonishing mummy from afar. And his interest isn't purely archaeological: even his dream of visiting the Tollund Man already sounds rather like a religious pilgrimage.
This poem will trace the speaker's reflections on Tollund Man—reflections that will travel from the Iron Age right up to 20th-century Ireland, where, in the speaker's unhappy opinion, some version of human sacrifice is still going on.
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Lines 5-11
In the flat ...
... a long time. -
Lines 12-20
Bridegroom to the ...
... Reposes at Aarhus. -
Lines 17-20
Trove of the ...
... Reposes at Aarhus. -
Lines 21-24
I could risk ...
... to make germinate -
Lines 25-28
The scattered, ambushed ...
... in the farmyards, -
Lines 29-32
Tell-tale skin and ...
... along the lines. -
Lines 33-40
Something of his ...
... knowing their tongue. -
Lines 41-44
Out here in ...
... and at home.
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“The Tollund Man” Symbols
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The Tollund Man
The Tollund Man himself is a symbol of all the people who have ever died fruitless deaths in the name of a religious or political belief.
Sacrified to a bloodthirsty "goddess," the Tollund Man reminds the speaker of all the young Irish dead of the Troubles. Like them, he might well have gone to his death believing that it had a purpose or a meaning—a meaning that, in the speaker's opinion, isn't nearly as valuable as any single human life.
In both his calm humanity and his tragic fate, the Tollund Man thus becomes an image of generations of lost lives.
Where this symbol appears in the poem:- Lines 1-20: “Some day I will go to Aarhus / To see his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin cap. / In the flat country near by / Where they dug him out, / His last gruel of winter seeds / Caked in his stomach, / Naked except for / The cap, noose and girdle, / I will stand a long time. / Bridegroom to the goddess, / She tightened her torc on him / And opened her fen, / Those dark juices working / Him to a saint's kept body, / Trove of the turfcutters' / Honeycombed workings. / Now his stained face / Reposes at Aarhus.”
- Lines 23-26: “pray / Him to make germinate / The scattered, ambushed / Flesh of labourers,”
- Lines 33-34: “Something of his sad freedom / As he rode the tumbril”
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“The Tollund Man” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language
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Imagery
The poem's imagery helps readers to feel the speaker's fascination with the Tollund Man, and his horror over the Troubles.
The poem begins with a portrait of Tollund Man. Preserved in a bog for millennia, he seems almost to have become part of the earth: his skin is the same "peat-brown" as the earth around him, and his eyelids have become "mild pods," like the ancient plant matter that makes up peat. His "pointed skin cap" feels earthy, too—and also marks him out as someone from a distant, long-vanished culture.
This imagery paints the Tollund Man, not just as an earthy figure, but as a gentle one. Anyone who's seen a picture of the Tollund Man will know that he looks as if he were sleeping; the speaker's attention to his "mild" eyelids captures that peaceful feeling.
The poem's next images, however, paint a more forensic picture. The speaker knows that the Tollund Man's "last gruel" was "caked in his stomach," preserved (and compressed) just like his flesh. But of course, one can't cut open a sleeping person's stomach to find out what they ate. This image underlines Tollund Man's emphatic deadness.
The Tollund Man isn't just a peaceful sleeper or a crime scene body, however: he's also a religious sacrifice. When the speaker imagines how the "goddess" allowed the "dark juices" of the bog to slowly stew the Tollund Man, his imagery suggests that those "dark juices" might be, not just literally dark-colored, but full of sinister magic.
After this portrait of the Tollund Man as a calm sleeper, a crime victim, and a sacrifice, the speaker's pictures of the Irish dead feel a lot simpler and grimmer. Like the Tollund Man, some of these figures are marked by their clothing: they're "stockinged corpses," looking vulnerable in their socks as they lie dead in their own "farmyards." Some, though, have been reduced to "tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers"—mere stains and scraps, speckling the railroad upon which they were dragged to death.
The poem's imagery thus helps readers to imagine all these different (and similar) dead bodies: their shared humanity and their shared suffering.
Where imagery appears in the poem:- Lines 2-4: “his peat-brown head, / The mild pods of his eye-lids, / His pointed skin cap.”
- Lines 7-8: “His last gruel of winter seeds / Caked in his stomach,”
- Lines 15-20: “Those dark juices working / Him to a saint's kept body, / Trove of the turfcutters' / Honeycombed workings. / Now his stained face / Reposes at Aarhus.”
- Lines 27-28: “Stockinged corpses / Laid out in the farmyards,”
- Lines 29-30: “Tell-tale skin and teeth / Flecking the sleepers”
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Allusion
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Metaphor
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Asyndeton
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Enjambment
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Alliteration
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Assonance
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"The Tollund Man" Vocabulary
Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.
- Peat
- Torc
- Fen
- A saint's kept body
- Turfcutters
- Blasphemy
- Consecrate
- Germinate
- Sleepers
- Lines
- Tumbril
- Parishes
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(Location in poem: Line 2: “To see his peat-brown head,”)
A kind of thick soil created when grasses and plants slowly and incompletely decay in a bog or swamp.
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “The Tollund Man”
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Form
"The Tollund Man" is built from eleven four-line stanzas (or quatrains), divided into three sections.
The sections act rather like a three-act play:
- In the first section, the speaker imagines a visit to the Tollund Man's body in Denmark—and then what it might have been like to be the Tollund Man on the day of his execution.
- In the second section, the speaker connects the Tollund Man to the Irish dead of the Troubles—a different (and yet horribly similar) kind of human sacrifice.
- And in the third section, the speaker imagines driving across the Danish countryside, feeling both "lost" in this foreign land and "unhapp[ily] [...] at home." He knows that, wherever one goes in the world, people have killed each other in the name of supposedly righteous causes.
Within these different "acts," the drumbeat constancy of the quatrains underlines the speaker's central point: religious and political murder just keeps happening, essentially the same across time and space.
The steady quatrains also feel restrictive: they often break sentences or ideas in unlikely places, cutting across the speaker's train of thought. This choice might evoke the way that distinct, individual, one-of-a-kind human beings find themselves falling into (or forced into) ancient patterns of behavior.
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Meter
"The Tollund Man" is written in free verse, so it doesn't use a regular meter. Instead, a varied rhythm makes the speaker's voice feel down-to-earth, conversational, and thoughtful.
However, from time to time, the poem quietly drops into accentual meter: that is, meter that doesn't stick to any one metrical foot, but instead uses a certain number of stressed syllables per line. This poem chooses accentual dimeter, lines with two stresses apiece. Here's how that sounds:
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpsesThese moments of accentual meter fit right in with the poem's (and the poet's!) interest in the ancient world. Accentual meter is the oldest form of meter there is, and it turns up everywhere from nursery rhymes to Old English epics like Beowulf (which, not coincidentally, Heaney translated).
The dimeter here is also evocative, creating a pulsing, pounding rhythm like an executioner's drum or a terrified heartbeat.
When accentual meter breaks into the poem's free verse, it thus both creates moments of drama, and reminds readers that this poem is dealing with tragedies as old as humanity.
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Rhyme Scheme
Written in free verse, "The Tollund Man" doesn't use a rhyme scheme. But the speaker does use plenty of powerful repeated sounds, giving the poem some stern music.
For instance, listen to the rhythmic alliteration, assonance, and consonance in the first stanza:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.The strong alliterative /p/ sound helps to give lines 2-4 a point-by-point quality, as if the speaker is considering each of the Tollund Man's features, one after the other. The /d/ consonance brings words to a quiet-but-firm close that suggests the stillness of a museum. And long /ee/ and /i/ assonance makes the lines feel balanced and harmonious. The Tollund Man's peaceful (and even beautiful) face, these sounds suggest, inspires hushed reverence.
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“The Tollund Man” Speaker
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Seamus Heaney often wrote first-person poetry from his own perspective, and the melancholy Irish speaker of "The Tollund Man" seems likely to be a version of Heaney himself. Heaney became fascinated with bog bodies in the 1970s, and wrote a whole series of poems relating these Iron Age mummies to the Troubles. For these reasons, we're referring to the speaker as "he" in this guide—but readers don't have to interpret the speaker as Heaney to make sense of the poem.
Whether the speaker is Heaney or not, he's world-weary and sad, haunted by the thought that people have always killed each other in the name of religious or political righteousness. Imagining making a trip to Denmark just to look the Tollund Man in his ancient face, this speaker seems to want to confront that tragic, bewildering reality.
He's also a humane and empathetic person, able to imagine his way into the Tollund Man's experiences—and even to feel how the Tollund Man might have experienced his own death as a holy, worthwhile sacrifice.
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“The Tollund Man” Setting
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This poem visits Denmark and Ireland, the past and the future—all in the speaker's imagination.
In the first part of the poem, the speaker says that "some day" he'll make a trip to Denmark to visit the Tollund Man in a museum in Aarhus. But such a visit, he thinks, will also carry him into Denmark's distant past. He imagines standing on the "flat country" where the Tollund Man was unearthed and then envisions himself as the Tollund Man on his way to be sacrificed to the "goddess" in a dark, boggy "fen," almost 2,500 years ago.
But these thoughts also carry him to the more recent past in Ireland: the atrocities of the Troubles, in which human bodies were battered to mere "flesh," "skin," and "teeth." The ordinary "farmyard" landscape of these horrors, in the speaker's mind, has rather a lot in common with the windswept swamps where the Tollund Man died: both times and places sanctioned dreadful violence by claiming it was righteous or holy.
By leaping around in time and space, the poem makes its central point clear: pointless killings in the name of religious or political belief have been around as long as humanity has.
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Literary and Historical Context of “The Tollund Man”
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Literary Context
Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) was an important Irish poet, translator, and essayist. Much of Heaney's poetry is grounded in his native landscape. Born in majority-Protestant Northern Ireland to a Catholic family, he saw the terrors of the Troubles first hand, and often reflected on that long-running bloodbath in his verse; "The Tollund Man" is just one example among many.
But Heaney also loved the Irish countryside, and much of his richly atmospheric poetry takes place in the Ireland of his youth. He was interested, not only in Ireland's natural beauty, but in the difficult lives of the people who worked the land, and his poems often strike a balance between grounded realism and lyrical poignancy.
Some see Heaney as a descendent of Romantic poets like William Wordsworth, whose poetry similarly described ordinary life and rural landscapes in plainspoken language. Heaney also admired poets like Robert Frost and Ted Hughes, who found deep (and sometimes mythic) significance in everyday scenes.
But Heaney was also deeply influenced by much, much older poetry. A scholar of Old English, he made an acclaimed translation of Beowulf, and his poetry sometimes borrows from Old English verse, using kennings and accentual meter.
Unlike a lot of poets, Heaney was both a popular and critical success during his lifetime and became a well-known man of letters. He was awarded the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature and served as honorary Professor of Poetry at Oxford University.
Historical Context
Seamus Heaney became interested in bog bodies when he read Danish archaeologist P.V. Glob's book, The Bog People. The stories of these Iron Age mummies reminded Heaney of his own Irish childhood: he grew up near a bog, in which people harvesting peat would often unearth the remains of ancient creatures and cultures. (In his poem "Bogland," for instance, Heaney recalls the time his neighbors pulled the skeleton of an extinct Irish elk out of the turf.)
The book's images of the bog mummies also made Heaney think of other pictures of corpses: the endless news photos of contemporary Irish people who were murdered during the Troubles. This long-running 20th-century conflict pitted Protestants (who mostly wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK) against Catholics (who mostly wanted Northern Ireland to be part of a separate and independent Irish state). The sectarian violence these political/religious divisions provoked killed thousands of people.
Heaney, a Catholic who grew up in Northern Ireland and eventually fled the Troubles, thus saw in the bog bodies a reminder that such devastating violence is nothing new.
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More “The Tollund Man” Resources
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External Resources
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Heaney's Life and Work — Visit the Poetry Foundation to read a short biography of Heaney and read more of his poetry.
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Heaney's Creative Process — Read a short piece in which Heaney discusses his writing room and his writing habits.
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The Poem Aloud — Listen to a reading of the poem.
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The Tollund Man — Learn more about the Tollund Man (and see pictures of his astonishingly well-preserved face).
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An Interview with Heaney — Read an interview with Heaney in which he discusses "The Tollund Man," as well as his thoughts and feelings about the Irish political situation in the 1970s.
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LitCharts on Other Poems by Seamus Heaney
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